Brain Injuries and Amnesia

For someone who has sustained a traumatic brain injury, there is the risk of amnesia or loss of memory. Following my partner's motorcycle accident and subsequent injury, he lost all memory of the ten years preceding his accident.

This type of memory loss is called retrograde amnesia which eliminates any memory of events prior to the accident. It may only be for the preceding few minutes, hours or days rather than the more unusual extensive period that my partner experienced. When he became more aware, after ten days in a medically induced coma, he thought it was ten years in the past. He had no recollection at all of his accident and had lost ten years of his memory.

This was a traumatic experience for me, as I'm sure it was for him because during this ten year amnesia period, his wife had died and we met each other three years prior to his accident. When I visited him, there were times that he knew my name and other times when I asked him if he knew who I was that he avoided the question. But even when he seemed to know my name, I don't think he had any real understanding of what our relationship meant to him. Even after he had been out of the hospital for several months and appeared to have recovered most of his memory of that ten year period, he admitted that he had no accurate realization of what our relationship had been like prior to his accident. This was very disconcerting. We were virtually strangers.

This period was a learning experience for him. When I asked him how old he was, he gave me the age he would've been ten years previously. There were many friends who visited that he didn't recognize including some he had known for twenty plus years. He had no memory of the new home we had moved into, still thinking he lived where he had for many years. He also had no memory of the year or make of car that he drove instead telling me about one he had driven years before.

He talked about people in his past I had never heard of as if they were current friends. I began an experiement of asking him to help me make up a list of our 'welcome to our new home' party. All of his first suggestions were people who were mostly unknown to me. The second time we did the experiment a couple of weeks later, the list was comprised of some people that I knew and others that I didn't. On the third try, the list was pretty much who would normally have been on it.

During the six to eight week period before he gradually began to remember some of that lost period of time, I brought pictures into the hospital of family and friends, pictures of our new home, things from our home that I hoped might jog his memory and albums showing different trips we had taken together.

As he began remembering a few things, it seemed that he was making up stories. In actual fact, when someone has suffered retrograde amnesia, they will often fill in the blanks in stories when they can't quite remember the whole story.

It is difficult to say whether my partner does remember everything from that ten year period or not since I can't verify all of it. Even he is not sure whether he does or not. Some of his memory may, in fact, be made up to replace what he can't remember.

My partner also suffered from anterograde amnesia which is memory loss immediately following an injury. Even now after three and a half years post injury, he has no memory of his accident. He also has very little memory of any of his four month hospital stay. Survivors of brain injury will often have difficulty remembering anything new. In this case new events or learning new things will often not go into the long-term memory bank. For this reason they may become discouraged from doing anything that they aren't already familiar with.

For those people suffering from these types of memory losses, it must be like living in a fog - they know it's there but it's just beyond their grasp.